Roger Moore

The suspense Hitchcock mastered in his films of the ’30s becomes excruciating here as we watch the various threads unravel into a deadly finale.

Gay coming-of-age stories are common enough these days, but Moonlight finds a new perspective, a new setting and a compelling new filmmaking voice to tell that story. It’s one of the best pictures of the year.

Not just rewarding and quite moving, but important oral and visual history, a movie worth watching even if you think you’ve read or seen all there is to know about this seminal figure in American history.

Daniel Day Lewis, Hugh O’Conor and director Jim Sheridan made damned sure that whatever Hollywood thought, whatever “rewarding a stunt performance ” rationale might enter in filmdom’s collective mind about this bit of work, their combined efforts would be never less than a wholly realized human being.

With Parasite [Bong] transcends genre even as he sharpens his social satire skills, delivering a movie that will resonate from Seoul to Syracuse, Helsinki to Hong Kong, one of the great films of 2019.

Roma is arty and beautiful, but also a bit like sitting on a sofa while Cuarón flips through family photo albums, never narrating or over-explaining any single moment or image.

Questlove, billed as Ahmir-Khalib Thompson here, has made one of the most entertaining concert films in years, a piece of Baby Boomer nostalgia that is thrilling and moving, jaw-dropping (those Pips get me, every time) and toe-tapping, and a history lesson, all rolled into one.

McQueen and his stellar cast take us on a difficult journey, an odyssey that will make you want to avert your eyes. It is to their great credit that we don’t.

What Lonergan has created here is one of the cinema’s defining statements on the kind of grief that leaves you gutted, of wounds that will never heal. He’s got the guts to make us uncomfortable in scene after scene, and the courage to deny us “The Hollywood Ending.”

Bullock and Clooney make their peril our peril in this absolutely gorgeous, moving and sometimes exultant reminder that the real terrors of space are scary enough, without invented bug-eyed monsters thrown in.

“Battle” is is by turns serio-comic and chilling to the point of depressing.

The performances, direction and writing of one of the best pictures of 2010 make this Social Network every bit as addictive, and a little chilling as well.

It’s still a lovely character study in a lovely setting, even if the romance rarely achieves the urgency or heat to truly animate this “portrait.”

Best of all is the man who stands front and center, thinking, smoking and expounding, off-the-cuff, about a subject he spent his career and life mulling over, fuming over and struggling to understand in depth.

Aftersun is unnecessarily obscure and overdoes the whole “understated/unstated” thing.

There’s deja vu in watching Tolontan deal with Romanian TV, which eagerly follows his team’s reporting each night, but which cannot resist from shooting at the messenger when he appears on their talk shows, losing the thread and forgetting the real victims here.

Haynes never lifts Carol above over-dressed melodrama. And with every perfect bar where every perfect martini is served, every perfect dive of a motel on the “Lolita” roadtrip that the “just friends” abruptly take together, Carol betrays its true priorities.

Great directors make great movies. And with Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan has made his second masterpiece, thrilling history retold, remembered and relished.

And as long as it is, it would be a pity to cut one moment of Spall’s immersive, utterly convincing portrait of this common man with an uncommon gift.

Does this stylistically unstylish picture stand with the lurid glories of “Casino,” the pulse-pounding narrative drive and cinema semiotics of “The Departed,” or the charismatic cynicism of “Goodfellas?” Give me a freaking break.

It’s a wholly original child’s-eye-view of emotions and growing up, a demanding movie for small children and a rewarding and touching one for their parents.

It’s not the most consequential of films, but from first stop to almost the last, it’s a trippy, traveling delight.

Call Me by Your Name isn’t so much a bad movie as a dull, bloated one, a tale of teen sexual intensity drawn out beyond the point of holding our interest, footnoted with all these spoken (repeatedly, by one and all) provisos — “This is OK because…” That’s all well and good, but I found it lacking as drama (no parental conflict), romance and period piece, a turgid potboiler overheated under the Tuscan sun.

Marriage Story is almost funny enough and touching just often enough to endorse. It’s good, but it’s no “Scenes from a Marriage” or “Husbands and Wives” or hell, “Company,” for that matter. It’s just Netflixable.

Writer-director Damien Chazelle (“Whiplash”) reaches for the stars, and cast the picture beautifully. But this throwback musical (songs by Justin Hurwitz) lurches along on show business cliches in between dreamy flights of fancy.

It’s a slight film, but as befits something as introspective and spooky as this, it’s not delicate or dainty.

It’s the genius of this genial, formulaic coming-of-age comedy that Lady Bird never seems too broadly drawn. We’ve known this kid, gone to school with her, watched her reinventions continue straight on into college.

Shoplifters, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a film acted with great sensitivity, a rough story delicately told.

Hollywood will simplify it to that big concept, and trim writer-director Maren Ade’s flaccid storytelling and many aimless scenes into something tighter, funnier and almost certainly less German.

The effect is a movie that has a couple of great scenes tucked into a brilliantly excruciating tale that will not let go of its feeling of dread, or its manic energy.

The movie is so “interior,” it so zeroes in on Isaac and his baleful stare, that we’re relieved any time something overtly funny happens.

Pacing aside, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” is an intensely lovable picture, a daring comedy that went against the “patriotism first” ethos of the war films of its day.

Field and Blanchett have given us an unforgettable character presented in almost molecular detail, and a glorious, guts-and-Gustav behind-the-scenes plunge into a rarefied world few of us have so much as dabbled in or seriously wondered about, even if we know our Tchaikovsky from our Mahler, pianissimo from forte.

It’s a poetic, mystical and meandering immersion in the life-as-a-slave experience, both for the viewer and for our on-screen surrogate.

If history’s tide runs against the Globe, at least those who worked there have the satisfaction of exposing a global wrong, and helping to end it. And they have McCarthy’s film, one of the best pictures of 2015, as a permanent record, a tribute in cinematic form, to their art and craft in its finest hour.

If you love movies you should love the ones with great writing. And if you’re looking for that yardstick against which to better judge any movie that comes along, you can’t do better than immerse yourself in Chinatown.

It’s interesting enough as it invites the viewer into interpretations, messages it might be sending and observations Devos is making about our changing world and those best adapted to roll with those changes, taking comfort and pleasure wherever they settle and accumulate.

Rarely has a movie gone as deep into the magical resiliency and adaptability of childhood.

When it’s over, there’s nothing more to take from the film than the uneasy feeling that what we’ve seen is either intolerant and biased, or a warning. It’s not Islamophobic to fear the spread of this primitive oppression, be it in Syria or Nigeria.

The surgeries shown here, organs in their place in the crowded human body, functioning or failing, is indeed eye-opening. But the film’s structure is, as an ancient Roman critic would have put it, inportunum et inordinatum.

Longer, more thorough and tweaked to play to modern audiences better, Apocalypse Now Redux packs every bit the wallop it did when it was new. After Gallipoli and Full Metal Jacket, after even Platoon, it remains the definitive anti-war war movie.

“Zone” is a cryptic, underexplained tale that buries us in banality and educates us about evil.

The politics are rarely overt. “Pussy Riot” stories pop up on TV, and the Orthodox Church’s role in the hierarchy (cozying up to power, serving as a calming “opiate” to the masses) is mocked. Zvyagintsev is a bit too willing, in this overlong film, to let the landscape, the remote setting and the insular world of crumbling apartment blocks, sagging houses, collapsing churches grey skies shape the film’s message.

Dazzling, scary and sentimental.

It’s a movie of repressed characters living interior monologues not delivered, the cinema of droning along storytelling rebranded as “serene” or “patient.” That makes this festival darling one of those films you ponder and appreciate, almost at arm’s length. It’s that afraid of moving you.

While there are things to be explored and pondered in drab “Saint Omer,” Diop’s organization of her message and lack of prioritization of simple courtesy-to-the-viewer information we need in order to follow the story and answer that fundamental question, “What the hell is this thing about?” leaves a lot to be desired.

Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have logged on at all?

Gerwig’s concocted a fresh, frothty and fun take on a timeworn classic, the perfect family film for the holidays.

It’s a sardonic satire that lacks the wit, style or pacing to let it come off.

Make no mistake, “Soundtrack” is a real work of art, an historic film painted with extant footage, a fresh interview or two, sound from many sources and thoughts, facts and opinions from a wide range of people with a stake in not just events back then, but the urgent need to have those facts preserved and honestly served up to those of us trapped in the present.

The most striking thing about this classic adventure epic today might be its look. Using real locations, crumbling brick fortresses, parched passes and snowcapped peaks, “King” feels positively analog in its depiction of an “exotic” place of both beauty and stark, hardscrabble ugliness.

Intentions and inspiration aside, Last Jedi doesn’t add up to an “Empire Strikes Back” for this trilogy. There’s no romance, little pathos and no real punch-in-the-gut moment. Its emotionally sterile tone was set with “The Force Awakens,” and that’s proven hard to shake, new innovations and plot twists aside.

The frights are muted, but the air of dread that hangs over Irish writer-director Kate Dolan’s debut feature makes it an immersive experience, one anybody with “mother issues” will quickly identify with.

It goes on too long, but this is personal essay filmmaking at its best, one that passes that ultimate test of such self-involved projects. It has a story worth telling.

Nickel Boys is American history, Southern history and Florida history uncovered and exposed, and a cautionary lesson to a culture backsliding into the comfort of more and more lies and delusions, all served up in one of the most artful films of 2024.

This grand curtain call is a much better gateway film for inspiring new fans of the undisputed master of his art form to dig into his back catalog and visit the striking and distinct worlds he dreamed up over his legendary sixty year career.

In just 70 minutes, Hymanson has shown us what “soul mates” look like, and leveled with us about the best possible outcome for our final years, months and days. Not bad.

Panahi spins all this into a road comedy with a bittersweet aftertaste, letting us laugh out loud at the travel companion from Hell — or at least “The Ransom of Red Chief” — while wistfully reminding us of loss and leave-takings, the helpless desperation of running afoul of an authoritarian state, the very foundations of heartbreak.

It is immersive, letting us hear and feel the concussion of artillery, if not whistling hail of bullets and the desperation and fury of hand to hand combat.

What Smith and Gardiner have adapted is a rare and precious thing, a movie whose narrative momentum is carried by the simplest of longings — hope.

Anora lacks the raw emotion, street energy and urgency of Baker’s transgender romp “Tangerine” — and the pathos of his acclaimed peek at childhood homelessness in the “paradise” of “The Florida Project.”

It’s not history, stunning palace locations and lush costumes aside. The Favourite is just fun, “something completely different,” though it does tend to drag as it takes us where we are sure it must go.

Using archival footage, inventive animated recreations of incidents and chilling aerial smart-bomb views of air strikes as they happen, Moreh creates a simple yet elegantly damning film.

You’d be hard-pressed to think of a motion picture parable that more perfectly fits its moment and the mood of the country and the world it premiered into. Corbet has tapped into the zeitgeist as well as The American Myth and made a movie that makes you wince because he, like László Tóth, refused to sentimentalize it or avert his eyes from the ugliness.

Reinsve makes a more beguiling than compelling lead, letting on Julie’s “flakey” qualities, giving us hints that she’s self-aware enough to be bothered by them.

This thriller goes from bad to worse without the good manners of providing any one element that could be latched on to as more hilariously bad than the next. I couldn’t even find the elements of a bad movie drinking game out of this.

If it’s not one of Anderson’s best, “the good parts” stand out as some of the most endearing moments the movies have given us this year.

The whole affair plays as muzzled, truncated and incomplete — a ten furlong dash through a two mile (16 furlong) race.

A soft-spoken cast given to underplaying, a muddy, overcast setting in the beaver-trapping era on The Frontier and reveries about the simple pleasures of home, dearly bought in a rough and tumble world of men make this quiet, almost melancholy movie one to be savored.

Grim, gruesome and glorious.

This unblinking look at America's Red State Crystal Meth Belt is an instant Southern Gothic classic.

The Kafkaesque nightmare a woman endures trying to get a divorce in a theocracy is played out, in sometimes comical/often excruciating detail in Gett: The Trail of Viviane Amsalem.

There are bigger films and more entertaining stories coming to screens this holiday season. But there isn’t one more life and love-affirming than All of Us Strangers, a movie that reminds us that memory burnishes loved ones for a reason.

Exarchopoulos is a revelation, wearing her neediness, vulnerability and arousal with every muscle in her face, her posture, even her hair. It’s an utterly naked performance, literally and figuratively.

Phantom Thread is a dry, chilly and occasionally droll tale of unconventional love in 1950s British haute couture. But whatever this cryptic, slow and dramatically thin character study lacks, Lewis lovingly paints over with one last meticulously detailed, compact and sharply observed performance.

Non-linear in its storytelling, stingy with its facts, details and “truth,” it’s a picture that violates a lot of the basic covenants between filmmaker and audience.

[A] terrific and informative documentary.

With each rewind, the picture locks-up and we disconnect with what’s going on, and more importantly, with the characters. Which renders the minimalist promise of The Perfection a promise largely unfulfilled.

Mangrove isn’t the most emotional film in the series, nor the easiest way to be eased into this world. Courtroom dramas are predisposed to bogging down on the screen. But McQueen makes its history come alive, and lets us see the importance of this restaurant and its place within the events, lives and culture that emerge from every other movie in the series.

Kapsalis has written and directed an engrossing “woman on the verge” tale. But it is Azura Skye who draws us into it, earns our sympathy and makes us fear for how far this woman will be pushed before she pushes back, or snaps altogether.

Strip away the French and Arabic subtitles, the French-prison setting and the Muslim-messianic title, and A Prophet, opening Friday at The Enzian, would still be the grittiest prison thriller in years.

In Oppenheimer, Nolan tells an epic story tacked onto an introspective, multi-faceted life, a hero in the Greek tragedy mold — brilliant and focused, but a man who knew his flaws and conflicted enough about his work that he all but accepted his fate as just deserts for all the “blood on my hands.”

The leads are showcased engagingly, the locations — even ruined a bombed out Polish church, but including Paris, Yugoslavia and Occupied Berlin — rendered in romantic tones. But there’s not enough connection between those leads to generate the level of heat aimed for here.

Anybody familiar with Jarmusch’s work will recognize his static style — the muted long conversations, the quiet, the storytelling largely lacking in incident, melodrama or narrative drive. Longtime fans will wonder where the humor is.

The disco decadence, the seedy era before Times Square became a theme park, the lowered expectations of an endless recession, everything that was then and is now makes up American Hustle. And that’s what makes this the best movie of this holiday season.

The sweeping footage they captured is moving in its beauty. But the real reason for the film is “reason.” Ben Masters’ movie talks to stakeholders — ranchers, Border Patrol agents, experts on patterns of migration and immigration along the U.S./Mexico border and members of Congress. And none of them think this wall thing is a very good idea, for reasons ranging from the impracticality of it and the lack of utility (It won’t do the job.)

The script and Simmons, known for TV’s “The Closer” and as tantrum-tossing editor J. Jonah Jameson in “Spider-Man,” make Fletcher a monster, and then look for ways of explaining him.

Minding the Gap is a film of skill, pathos and humor, not the deepest movie up for an Best Documentary Oscar this year, but certainly the most approachable.

If you see it and wonder what the fuss was about, look no further than its star, the face that ate up another awards season.

Scorsese has delivered an ordeal pretty much guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth, one that in this case plays as pedestrian and repetitive, and never feels like an “epic.”

Huppert, after a career that has included “Entre Nous,” “8 Women,” and the equally unnerving “The Piano Teacher,” makes this unfiltered fury the capstone of a stunning career in which she journeyed from French sex symbol to grande dame of European cinema without losing even a hint of her allure.

Chung (“Lucky Life”), filming a tale both familiar and alien and a story not far removed from his own childhood, has made a breakout film of brittle tenderness, heart and hope — one that we hope makes him a filmmaker to watch from here on out.

What Wang gives us is an engagingly sentimental story with warmth, compassion and wit, peopled by relatives who, for all their cultural differences, are universal and yet enviable in their devotion to “the good lie” and the quality of life they see as worth protecting with it.

In Safdie’s film, all this expended on screen energy and effort isn’t edifying or rewarding. It’s just exhausting.

An old fashioned Japanese folk tale beautifully rendered in old-fashioned hand-drawn animation.

It’s not on a par with Scorsese or Coppola’s best statements on this history, but it’s not bad. And twice the De Niro at the same price makes it a bargain.

Zengel is a balled-up fist of energy in the title role, getting across the sweetness that can convince those who take pity on Benni that “she’s making progress,” but unleashing hell in a flash to remind them she isn’t.

The players and the situation (taken from a Hubert Monteilhet) novel make Phoenix an approachable, less-grueling Holocaust story than most. But the unreality of it all undoes some of that and makes this brief, smart and heartfelt story feel like a pulled-punch.